EuroJudged: Dawn Of War II

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Whee! Dawn of War II has been released at last, and I’ve already reviewed it over here. Naturally we’ll be providing with an even more taut and cogent RPS opinion later in the week, but if you really must have a numeral attached to the game, then that’s your link. Still in a quandary? Then perhaps you should watch the Eldar action trailer, which we’ve conveniently embedded after the jump.

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In fact, I already own it. I went the long mile and even went down my local shop to pick it up. I was surprised and pleased at the inclusion of a tech tree chart – surprised because the simplicity of the tech doesn’t necessarily require a tree, and pleased because despite it’s near uselessness, it’s good tech tree.

Definitely buying this as both Relics history and the beta conviced me it would be a marvelous multiplayer game. I do think the oppinion that not having basebuilding in multiplayer takes away to much strategy to be an odd one. Personally I believe that this is more than made up for by the wargear (both on hero and units) upgrades. Most importantly however is that reducing base building (this is something that company of heroes did right as well) allows you to spend more of your time focusing on the battles.

Pre-ordered a couple weeks back to muck about with the beta early, and I’m looking forward to getting home and playing co-op with a friend.

From what I’ve played of it, I’m enjoying it thoroughly – stripping most of the irritating macro/base/economy management and focusing the players on certain points around the map means it’s great fun, particularly in 3v3 with a couple of friends.

Picked it up on the way to work* this morning. I still don’t understand why it’s £10 more expensive on Steam than at retail. A couple of quid extra I can deal with, for the convenience, but this is rather silly.

*I lie. I made a 20 minute detour before work to pick it up. What does that say about me?

I’m somewhat excited to play this, but lets be straight to the point, this is not as good as coh to me, they’ve already bested themselves. Add to this that the beta didn’t even boot on my lower end pc, meaning its less scalable than coh which ran great.

Okay maybe this is a stupid question to all your Warhammer fanatics, but does it seem to you that Star Craft basically ripped most of its settings out of W40K? Terrans have bulky space marines with mechs, zerg are basically reskinned tyranids, and the protoss look damned close to Eldar. Is Games Workshop just extremely generous that they didn’t sue? :P

Well, just had to get that off my chest. This game looks so fresh and interesting, I must have it. Thanks for the coverage so far.

Ohh Jonas, that’s a massive can of worms you’re trying to prise open there. It’s best just to pretend you didn’t write that and continue on like nothing happened, as said can is 50 m tall and full of Mongolian Death Worms. Or Tallarian Death Worms.

Despite having early access I managed to completely miss the entire beta of DoW2, mainly because I was in rural China at the time. Is there a demo I could try instead? Before I was kind of enthusiastic, but these days I’m a bit meh about the whole concept, so I’d really like to try it and see if it will rekindle something.

Jonas I heard they originally had a deal to make a 40k game and then it was cancel or something. They decided that they would change the races enough to avoid copyright infringement. I have no validity for these claims however.

I’l;l buy this eventually, but I’m really trying to make myself catch up on other stuff before buying more new PC games. This will either mean I don’t buy anything for ages or just not happen, and it’ll all end in a spree of reckless, wanton, bank balance-wrecking game-buying.

Blizzard ripped everything from GW, GW took a loot from Tolkien.
I think Blizzard did asked for a GW license for the first warcraft but didn’t get it…
So yeah blizzard did steal a lot from GW… But somehow I think relic got close to the tabletop, especially in SP as you have to do with what you are given, no base, only action. The multi is also interesting, you get a base true but it remains really basic. The choice is not on which building to build next and when do you move to tech2, but more on what unit do you choose to bring to the battle. To me this way more interesting that base building because you are kept almost all the time in the action!

@nightcat, Blizzard originally made Warcraft on the understanding that it would be attached to the Warhammer Fantasy IP, GW then changed their minds. Starcraft was not made under the same circumstances but the look and feel is obviously ‘inspired’ by 40k.

Back on topic: I’ll not be buying DOW2 til the issue of how easy it is to mod is cleared up and its a helluva lot cheaper. £34.99 is an awful lot of money to spend on a game which I simply won’t use the multiplayer of.

Will pick up my reserved copy on the way home from work tonight.
Looks quite promising tbh. Wonder what kind of impact those Limited Edition Wargear packs will have, since I got the Sniper version.
(LE was the same price in pre-order as the normal one anyway.)

played the beta as much as my busy schedule allowed. I love the multiplayer experience. Even after having played it so much I have so many plans for combos and tactics I havent had time to try out. can’t wait for my work day to finish.

Re: The GW/Blizzard thing. You know, everyone says this online but there’s not one available quote from anyone involved in either company to support it. I’m not quite sure why people believe it automatically.

Grrr – got a copy this morning but am away all weekend doing social stuff with girlfriend so won’t get to play it until maybe Sunday night. Hate it when social stuff interferes with my playing a much anticipated game (sad, sad man that I am).

Yes, I’ll be buying this….when I get a rig capable of running it, that is. Despite hating the actual board-game-and-miniatures thing, I love Space Marines, I love the WH40K universe and I have had fun in massive quantities with DoW that probably shouldn’t be allowed in polite societies. Oh, and hurrah for Marines with personalities! I’ll be naming mine Jools and Jops and possibly Ubik at the first opportunity, then crying over their graves when I get them killed…

I imagine Starcraft Game is like a War40K the movie, the game, the movie, the lorecraft book, the game. Since War40K The Game is like Starcraft Lore, the comic book, the movie, the platform game, the move, the game.

I don’t really feel *any* of the WAR40K games (other than the boring Space Hulk serie) are near to WAR40K lore than to “generic space marines” lore. To make a WAR40K game, you have to distand yourself from the “generic space marines” lore, with elements from WAR40K that are unique to WAR40K. That is the chaos gods, the deformation of reality by these evil creatures, wars with zillions of deads daily, gigacreatures, gigaarmsy, gigabattles, a very horrible veyr dark style, etc

Didn’t like the beta much.. for one, I missed base building (I’m such a turtle…), for two, GFWL is a piece of crap.

Turning GFWL mic volume to 0 turns the general windows volume control slider to 0…. great design, there. Also no push to talk function that I could find. Also needlessly complicated inviting of friends to your game. Also COMPLETELY USELESS RUBBISH.
So, there. I won’t be buying it, unless I hear absolutely stellar things about the single player.

@Mandril: PLay.com sold it to me for £22.99.. A bargain compared to Game and HMV which were trying to pry 34.99 out of greasy little hands.

As for the game, I’ve only played the first few missions of the campaign and, already, i’m enjoying it. I played the Beta and that was fun, more tactical than the original. I’m going to spending a lot of time in this game over the next few weeks.

Myself and my friends pre-ordered it and I got it running just before midnight last night and played right through until 3am. I’d heard a lot of people were being forced to install it from STEAM (i.e. download it) rather than from the disc. Thankfully this seemed to have been resolved in that hour of AIM fury.

I love the single player campaign. It feels like Final Liberation in a way, with the campaign map and finite resources. The Wargear is lots of fun and adds a very great deal to the gameplay. The lack of base building is no detractor, the focus on the units and characters more than makes up for it and the cover system is great.

I can’t wait to try the co-op and multiplayer.

My major gripe is GFWL being a pain to work with over Hamachi (having to work around it via the registry) and the lack of support for my surround sound. I have to switch my system to stereo or it lags the sound horribley in game. Both are a nuisance but far from game breaking.

RE: “wot” KG wrote; that’s exactly why I said it’s a big ol’ can of worms, there’s just so much talk around the subject but no substance. Such discussion usually ends up quite messy too, so I’m sorry for contributing more to it.

So DoW2 is another Steam and GfWL game? Wonderful. Is there anybody out there that actually likes GfWL, and if so could they explain to me what the benefits of having DoW2 associated with GfWL would be?

I’m with Azradesh here, there is no sensible reason why I need to be online to play the single player, nevermind signing into GFWL. I have the same problem with GTAIV. I know this has been looked at here with Fallout3 as well. I’ll try to stop thinking about it as it infuriates me.

After a while the honeymoon period ends and you realise 95% of the campaign is killing the same bosstypes on only a few different multiplayer maps that are used over and over and over … you get the idea : )

While production values are generally great I find this constant reuse of multiplayer maps extremely lazy, even insulting in a vague way.

Most of the fluff feel is also gone : while your men may sometimes say something 40k’ish (such is the fate of the enemies of man !!), mostly it’s just bland audio stuff that could’ve fitted into any number of rts games. Gone are the excellent quips you could hear in the original dow, seemingly lifted straight from various 40k codices.

i’d rather have GfWL than Steam. At least it’s optional (in Fallout 3 it was) and doesn’t forces you to be online to play it. Steam is just plain needless DRM. I don’t know why everyone is always giving BJ’s to steam, i hope it dies an horrible death someday (and then you won’t have your games that you spent loads of cash on)

I have enough really-quite-good RTSes. Being the sequel a game so enormously compelling, I was hoping this game was going to represent a ‘this is the way forward’ sort of moment.

GfWL seals the deal, of course. If MS really insist on pushing a service of this calibre into games released on their platform, I’d rather they just employed someone to punch me in the back of the head every time I load one.

@Syneval“While production values are generally great I find this constant reuse of multiplayer maps extremely lazy, even insulting in a vague way.”

It may feels insulting, and theres a Theory about this very design style:
Singleplayer is just a way to “train newbies”, so are ready to play multiplayer (the big leagues). So If you play singleplayer, you are a newbie, or scared to play The Real Thing.
The campaing is the tutorial of multiplayer. You are not supposed to have fun with the campaing, just learn to play.

Oh I wanted too. I enjoyed the beta which THQ seemed fit to release worldwide, but then they went and decided to regionally restrict sale of the game. Guess they didn’t want my money after all. So no. I’m not buying it, because THQ won’t let me.

RuySan: You don’t have to be online to use steam, and the ability to redownload your games at any time catapults it from “uselss” to “indispensable” imo (your milage may vary, depending on how good you are at organising your game DVDs and boxes. Me? Not very. Hence steam)

But why do you wish me to lose my games? Can’t you just be happy for me? :(